Suchergebnisse

This article examines the possibilities and futures of consumer society and the progression of a post-moral marketing paradigm through a critical review of J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes.

Considering the inherently divisive legacy of political (anti)heroes, marketing scholars have paid limited attention to the construction of heroic political profiles and institutions. Accordingly, this study seeks to provide an original and thorough analysis on how two 20th century political (anti)heroes have been manufactured and shaped through early and contemporary forms of marketing practice. Adopting a historical perspective and focussing on the political profiles of Joseph Stalin and Margaret Thatcher, the aim of the paper is threefold. Firstly, we show the involvement of propaganda and marketing practice behind the emergence of heroic profiles and we highlight their impact to the construction of hero institutions. Secondly, we critically discuss the role of State propaganda and marketing forces in the shaping, maintenance and communication of collective heroic discourses aiming to strengthen the ideological underpinnings of these heroic institutions. Finally, we provide novel insights on the underexamined role of marketing practice as agent of social-political change behind the rise of political forces that shape government policy, marketplaces and consumer cultures.

In this article, we integrate Nietzsche's visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how 'market-based progress' is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity's great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean 'Overhuman' than it is to its inverse, the 'last human'. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer's subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.

AbstractThis paper reviews the development of discourse‐based analysis in marketing and consumer research and outlines the application of various forms of discourse analysis (DA) as an approach. The paper locates this development alongside broader disciplinary movements and restates the potential for critical DA (CDA) in marketing and consumer behaviour research. We argue that discourse‐based approaches have considerable potential and application particularly in terms of supporting disciplinary reflexivity and research criticality. A discursive lens offers novel ways of understanding marketing as a subject/discipline as well as how marketing academics conceive and investigate objects of marketing inquiry. The objectives of this paper are fourfold: to outline the development of discourse and text‐based studies in marketing and consumer research; to reveal how this has shaped, framed and limited the application and utilisation of DA in particular ways; to synthesise the main principles of DA generally and CDA specifically; and highlight how these approaches could be applied to a range of marketing and consumer behaviour issues and contexts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper applies Jean Baudrillard's order of simulacra to further investigate the paradigm of relationship marketing (RM). A brief overview of RM is given, followed by a summary of the main critical perspectives taken towards the approach. We argue that Baudrillard's theories of simulation and post-industrial culture provide a useful analytical approach through which to resolve some of these critiques. Relationships are simultaneously 'real' and 'imagined'. In the culture of simulation all cultural forms, including relationships, are open to critical analysis and interrogation. They are a construct that results from the complex interplay between signs, code and programme, which for our purposes are manifest as the market, marketing institutions and marketing technologies.

AbstractVisitors, travellers and migrants have a range of reactions to 'crossing culture', ie moving from one cultural environment to another. This paper reports a two‐stage multi‐method study that examines how visitors' consumer behaviour and use of material possessions influence resolution of cultural fracture during periods of cultural transition. The research consisted of a quantitative survey (n = 598) and a qualitative ethnoconsumerist study of visitors to the UK. Analysis of the survey data shows that nationality is a poor indicator of crossing‐culture experiences. A Six Typology Model of Cultural Fracture identified six cluster groups using combinations of three types of cultural fracture experience: symbolic fracture, emotional fracture and functional fracture. The six clusters vary by consumer behaviour and possession use. The ethnoconsumerist study illustrates that consumer‐related activities and possession used together provide an important resource that visitors can use to make sense of crossing‐culture experiences. Product categories, retail formats and shopping conventions are also implicated in experiences of cultural fracture to varying degrees. The paper concludes by considering the limitations of importing a priori assumptions regarding nationality and ethnic differences in cross‐cultural consumer research, and discusses some of the potential benefits of multi‐method research in this context. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications.

AbstractHere the case of recreational drug consumption by youths in the West of Scotland is applied to evaluate some prevailing models of consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction (CS/D). The findings suggest dissatisfactory and satisfactory outcomes do not always result in the types of future consumption behaviours proposed by some models of consumer CS/D. Although, as some models of CS/D suggest, satisfactory experiences tended to reinforce the desire to repeat consumption, when consumption was dissatisfactory, users tended to employ several strategies to justify further use. Whereas users attributed positive or pleasurable experiences to the narcotic effect of the substances consumed, dissatisfactory outcomes were attributed to other factors. Users develop sophisticated responses to dissatisfaction, such as deferment and denial. The findings have important implications for some theories and models of CS/D for consumer expectation: in particular, the effect of dissatisfactory experiences on future consumption intentions. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.

Nietzsche invites us to turn our focus to how subjects seek out what is average rather than what is authentically independent. For marketing theory, this means recognising that while the desire for autonomy and self-determination functions as a seductive and collective narrative for consumer culture generally, it inevitably becomes denatured and delimited to what each individual consumer finds to be most convenient, credible, and practical. Using a Nietzschean toolbox, this paper diagnoses a contemporary malaise in the process of 'commodified self-overcoming', whereby subjects are fed the mass-mediated fantasy that they can overcome the symbolic similitude of the majority while remaining comfortably part of the social 'herd'. We discuss this process using three illustrative archetypes: the inhuman 'BIG Zombie', the transhuman 'Cyborg', and the all-too-human 'Slacktivist'. These archetypes reveal how the prospect of overcoming the self and all of its human trappings functions as a core fantasy for consumers, albeit one that is paradoxically produced and supplied by market mechanisms that perpetuate a lasting humanism. We explore the notion of ante-humanism and conclude with implications for the nascent tradition of Terminal Marketing.

The contribution of psychoanalysis to marketing theory does not need to come from putting consumers on the couch. We show how psychoanalysis and marketing can be approached as character analysis using fiction, literature and popular culture through a psychoanalytic informed character reading of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's(1950 [1926]) The Great Gatsby and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's(1968 [1949]) Death of a Salesman. We examine the consumption desires and practices of these key protagonists to show how the psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and denial can be applied to explain their predicament. Our analysis emphasizes temporality, describing psychic time, its functioning with the ego-ideal and how consumption is implicated. We conclude that the seemingly distant domains of psychoanalysis, marketing and literature fiction offer an interesting synthesis that is able to provide insights for consumer theory, the contemporary consumer and the historical account of consumers of the past.